STEER Project – Social Telemedia

STEER’senvisages a community-centric digitally-based ecosystem which it refers to as “Social Telemedia”, as a cross-breeding of social networks and networked media. STEER contributes new technology enablers such as overlay network components, media synchronization, metadata extraction and bandwidth monitoring. STEER will … Continued

STEER’senvisages a community-centric digitally-based ecosystem which it refers to as “Social Telemedia”, as a cross-breeding of social networks and networked media. STEER contributes new technology enablers such as overlay network components, media synchronization, metadata extraction and bandwidth monitoring. STEER will develop a Social-Aware Media Enabled Cloud architecture and integrate with FIRE facilities such as OpenLab and EXPERIMEDIA. The two main scenarios being considered are mobile community-based content sharing at live events and on demand story telling.

EXPERIMEDIA’s Contribution to STEER

STEER require four distinct things from the EXPERIMEDIA facility: a) Social network extraction and analysis of data, b) Management of the experiment and collection of monitoring data, c) audio-visual streaming, and d) experimenting at real venues.

The STEER uses cases build on the concept of three interlinked graphs in order to facilitate the capturing of important information generated by each one of these graphs and make it available to each other, aiming at a flow of combined information that could be exploited by STEER content services. One important graph is the social graph comprised of actual users – potential members of STEER communities – that already have a social presence through various social networks e.g. Facebook, Twitter etc. This source of raw data could serve as either the primary or a complementary source of information that should be gathered and analysed in order to feed some of the STEER mechanisms e.g. recommendation engines. Such capability gives rise to our first requirement. STEER focuses on advanced analysis mechanisms for inferring fine grained and accurate user preferences. To this end, using an existing functionality that readily gathers and provides access to social network user data frees STEER from building such functionality and allows STEER to experiment with more sophisticated analysis tools. STEER will use EXPERIMEDIA’s SCC and deploying customized plugins for collecting and analysing social network information.

STEER uses cases have a dynamic nature and are expected to generate a wealth of data. Various system components include specific monitoring capabilities that generate and communicate various data. Each one of them uses their own APIs which makes it difficult to manage them and manipulate them in a homogeneous manner, especially when an experiment is running. EXPERIMEDIA provides an observation and monitoring framework as part of the Experiment Content Component (ECC) that supports exchange of monitoring data between client and server in the EXPERIMEDIA experimental facility. The ECC will provide ways for STEER components to be observed live at runtime and allows STEER-based metrics to be introduced and studied as part of experiments. For instance, STEER could observe as a metric the number of duplicate video blocks during the P2P distribution as a function of the overlay graph.
Both the ECC and SCC appear in the STEER architecture.

EXPERIMEDIA will offer access to Schladming (through negotiation with the venue representatives, Schladming2030) as a prestigious skiing venue for 3D-LIVE experimentation. The Schladming venue has an international reputation and hosts high profile skiing events and competitions (most recently, the 2013 FIS Alpine World Skiing championships). The specific experiments to be conducted at Schladming are currently being defined by the STEER consortium. One of the more difficult and complex issues is activating a community of users to participate in experiments. EXPERIMEDIA is working with STEER to understand the benefits of the system and how to market and engage with target user groups.

STEER’s Contribution to EXPERIMEDIA

STEER has defined two use case scenarios based on a Ski holiday in Schladming. The scenarios focuses on the relationship between visitors, multimedia content and FMI infrastructures both during live events and afterwards. The scenarios are well aligned with experiments conducted at Schladming and offer some interesting additions.

Firstly, the scenario considers how to synchronize broadcast and user generated content delivered to mobile users. This is a new experiment scenario and, although getting access to broadcast rights may not be possible at all Schladming events, STEER can demonstrate technical feasibility of the approach and use the results to engage wider broadcasters in the conversation. Secondly, STEER’s P2P media caching strategies, which include the use of peers such as home-gateways, provide mechanisms that can adapt content delivery to varying levels of infrastructure QoS. Adapting applications and services to the available network performance is an important aspect for system operations to maintain level of UX but also in experimentation to understand the relationship between QoS and UX. Such mechanisms may lead to exemplars on how to control experiments conducted at EXPERIMEDIA. Finally, STEER is developing social analytic plugins for the SCC. The advanced usage of the SAD will contribute to enrichment and has the potential to provide new algorithms that are available for future experiments at Schladming.